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"I will be positioned in the same seat by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer declared, adding that if our interview went well, he might invite the interviewer into Number 10 for a follow-up talk in the coming year.

For a PM, there's never truly time off for those in the top job. Just an hour before we sat down, Sir Keir had been on the phone with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and working to understand precisely had transpired in Venezuela, where his close political chum, US President Donald Trump, had just targeted and seized its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

By the time the discussion, which was much longer than usual, had ended, Maduro had been indicted in New York.

A Reboot for the New Year

With the year commences, the Prime Minister seems to have had something of a revitalisation. Maybe even just a bit of a rest with loved ones at Chequers, the prime minister's official country residence.

This seemed to have left him in improved morale than at the difficult end of 2025, a terrible annus horribilis for him.

But are he and his colleagues being unrealistic if they think his standing are about to improve?

Party Concerns

The grisly truth for the leader is that a significant number of his party members think he's underperforming at his job. Several of them would sooner gamble and get him out this year.

However Starmer was having none of it in the interview on Saturday morning.

Multiple times he stated he'd be "judged at the next election", maintaining no one would take his five-year mandate from him – despite the fact that the best chance of halting Nigel Farage and Reform UK entering No 10 could be for Labour to switch its leader.

"This is the battle of our lifetime and I intend to guide the party," he affirmed.

The Spring Test

The challenge for the PM is that he will be judged long before then – in a major set of elections in May across the UK. He attempted to argue, perhaps excessively, that they are about who runs councils, and who runs the governments in Holyrood or Cardiff – and not about Westminster.

Accurate – up to a point. But even though he may not want to admit it, No 10 will be judged by those elections too.

Despite this, Sir Keir implying that there were no situation under which he would walk away, even if a his MPs challenged him for the job, should those elections be disastrous for Labour.

Promises of Improvement

He tried to explain his low poll ratings by saying the voters was understandably impatient for things to improve. He aimed to convince the interviewer, and the public, that 2026 would be different.

The economy would strengthen notwithstanding rising unemployment, he argued, when plans the government put in place during their first turbulent year began to take effect.

• He vowed to empty asylum hotels ahead of the current deadline of 2029, but he did not set a firm date on that.
• He noted too, with the qualification that it was not a done deal, that a peace deal in Ukraine felt closer now than at any point since Russia's full-scale invasion.
• He stated for the first time that Western partners were now discussing how to integrate US and European forces to ensure security for Ukraine – to protect a possible peace.

His big argument is that soon the country will "see an improvement".

A Consistent Script

The PM may have communicated with more energy than I've seen from him for a while – less tense, perhaps, with more time to talk.

However, in spite of encountering pressure from within his own party for a bolder approach, with increased political vision, more urgency, more pace and more immediacy, his explanations were familiar ones.

Given that he is in such significant political trouble, does he need a new narrative?

No government, and certainly not one that has been unpopular for many months, gets everything its as desired.

Sir Keir's problems are not only because governing is difficult, but because he and his colleagues have made mistakes, even in the recent past.

Regrets and Risks

The PM expressed regret that he regretted saying he was "pleased" to welcome back the Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd El Fattah to the UK after an controversy when statements he'd previously made – such as calls for Zionists and police to be killed – resurfaced.

Sir Keir attributed it to "the process" for not realising what the activist had said before – a fancier way of saying it wasn't his responsibility.

And he is facing evident political perils as the year progresses. His alliance with the US president takes on a new complication after Trump's military action on Venezuela.

Based on years of interviewing Sir Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who opposed the war in Iraq, over his career, the thought he would be comfortable with these events seems unlikely.

Policy Stances and Pressures

He asserted he was a "longtime advocate of international law" but the public "simply haven't got the entire story at the moment".

Critics called for him to condemn it prior to the interview. And the administration is expected to face further scrutiny to give an explicit view in Parliament in the next few days.

There has also long been bubbling pressure in the Labour ranks to revisit some of the outcomes of Brexit.

Sir Keir denies he's heading in that direction, but his new more concrete pledge to move closer with the EU's single market – the giant economic European market – will probably provoke protests that he is going back on his pledge never to try to overturn the decisions that flowed from Brexit.

A commitment to align with more of the single market will please many on his own side, but it is easy fodder for Reform and the Conservatives to